


Lemonade

by alouette_des_champs



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Borderline Personality Disorder, But with some hot topical Beyonce references, Cheating, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, Let's be real it's about, M/M, POV Second Person, Suicide Attempt, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-23 08:56:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17680385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alouette_des_champs/pseuds/alouette_des_champs
Summary: Sometimes it feels incomprehensible to you that he has a whole other life with someone else just on the other side of the city. He and Julia are high school sweethearts, perfectly matched. It would be easy to hate her if you didn’t like her so damn much. She’s sweet and funny and smart, with a headful of corkscrew curls and a big, warm smile that crinkles up her nose and the corners of her eyes. She’s always smiling.She has no fucking idea.





	Lemonade

**Author's Note:**

> I know some people aren't fans of the second person, but I like it for fanfic. First person seems a little too close, while third isn't always close enough. Anyway, this is obvs from Taako's perspective. I strongly recommend not reading if you're at all triggered by depictions of suicide attempts. It's not particularly graphic, but it's there.

It’s been going on for months now.

The first time he kissed you, both of you were absolutely hammered at a Halloween party. You were dressed as ‘Baby One More Time’-era Britney Spears. He was The Hulk, and he’d gotten green body paint on your white thrift store blouse. The second time, you were both stone-cold sober in his car, parked in the mostly-empty parking lot of a JoAnn Fabrics. You had climbed across the center console and into his lap, and at some point, you had accidentally beeped the horn with your ass, as if to announce, _look at me! I’m making out with someone I shouldn’t be making out with in a parking lot in broad daylight!_

Things had quickly spiraled out of control after that. 

Half the time you feel like Delilah cutting Sampson’s hair, the whore who knows the strongman’s one weakness. You know he isn’t ready to come out. There’s a difference between being an ally and actually being part of the rainbow. He isn’t ready to own it. He doesn’t even know what that would mean, what it would look like. He works in a woodshop, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of tolerance and acceptance—he could lose his job. There are a lot more things to think about than just love is love is love.

Magnus is not not an easy person to have a clandestine affair with. Everyone in town seems to know him, like him, want a piece of him. When you go places together, there are a million friendly locals trying to chat him up about their dogs and their home improvement projects and their shitty families. He likes it, too. He’s a real good ol’ boy, like the love interest in a Lifetime movie about an overworked big city lawyer lady returning to her roots. He can talk about drill bits for an hour while you stand at his elbow, bored and annoyed and paranoid. It’s not like it’s suspicious to see the two of you together; you were friends long before this started. But you feel on-edge anyway. You feel hyper-aware of how close you are to him every second. It makes you irritable.

On top of that, he’s a shitty liar. He tells his girlfriend things that nobody with even half a functioning brain would believe. You’ve stopped asking questions. Whatever ridiculous, intricate web of bullshit their relationship is built upon is none of your business. 

But he’s better to you than any other guy you’ve ever been with. He’s a pull-the-chair-out, open-the-door kind of gentleman. He doesn’t yell, not even when he drinks. He laughs at everything you say. When you’re alone, he wants to touch you all the time, whether that’s playing footsie with you under the table or laying his big stupid head in your lap while you watch TV. It’s kind of like having a dog. He’s got all the good qualities of a pet—excitable, friendly, cute, hairy—but you don’t have to feed, water, or walk him. Plus you get to fuck him.

Sometimes it feels incomprehensible to you that he has a whole other life with someone else just on the other side of the city. He and Julia are high school sweethearts, perfectly matched. It would be easy to hate her if you didn’t like her so damn much. She’s sweet and funny and smart, with a headful of corkscrew curls and a big, warm smile that crinkles up her nose and the corners of her eyes. She’s always smiling.

She has no fucking idea.

About once a month, you decide that you can’t do it anymore. You turn notifications off on your texts and re-download Grindr, Tinder, or both. You’ll find someone else to occupy yourself with, someone available. Whether it takes an hour or a day or a week of impotent swiping, nauseatingly repetitive conversations, and unsatisfying hook-ups with some very shady individuals, you always go back.

Sometimes you feel really fucking bitter. _You can’t have it all, asshole,_ you think. _She’s going to find out. I’m going to get sick of being your big gay secret, someday. Julia is not going to forgive you for this, and neither am I._

But you _do_ forgive him. You can tell how guilty he feels, how it eats at him. He spends more time at the gym, working himself like a racehorse. He starts popping antacids like candy to sooth his anxious stomach. He stops sleeping. There are more cuts on his hands, little accidents at work. He’s distracted. You’re the distraction. He drinks too much and gets into bar fights.

He always calls you to come bail him out of the drunk tank, not her. This makes you feel stupid and used and proud and protective of him, of his obvious weakness. 

“I’m on the non-Beyoncé side of _Lemonade,_ ” you complain on the phone to your sister, driving to the county jail yet again on yet another grey Sunday morning. She just got married and moved out to the suburbs with her unbearably normal and well-adjusted husband. Pretending to be June Cleaver is taking up a lot of her time recently, but at least she still picks up the phone.

“At least you’re still Becky with the good hair,” she replies sympathetically. You can hear her clattering around in her kitchen. So fucking domestic. “That’s something.”

“Do you think there’s any chance that we’ll, I don’t know, team up to take him down like Beyoncé and Shakira circa 2006?”

“Slim to none, fam.”

When the cop brings him out to the lobby, you immediately feel a pang. He looks bad. Bags under his eyes, dark stubble on his cheeks, bruised jaw. Bloody knuckles. He’s gonna get killed if he keeps this up. The two of you walk out to your car in silence. You don’t make polite conversation before 10am. He sways a little on his feet; either he’s still drunk, or this is the traumatic brain injury that finally does him in.

“Where am I taking you?” you ask without looking at him, starting the car and pulling out of the parking lot.

“Just home,” he mutters, pressing his temple against the car window. “I feel like my brain got blendered.”

“Yeah, getting punched in the head isn’t something most doctors recommend.” Now that you’re in a confined space, you can smell him, an unpleasant combination of musty jail-smell, booze, body odor, and a hint of what might be vomit.

“What does a concussion feel like?”

“You tell me. I am more than certain this isn’t your first one.” You’re not altogether too concerned; he has the thickest skull of anyone you’ve ever met, both literally and figuratively. 

“Are you not supposed to sleep with one of those?”

“Pretty sure that ship already sailed.”

“Is this you saying that you’re not gonna wake me up every hour on the hour for the rest of the day to make sure I haven’t slipped into a coma?” He’s trying to be playful, but you’re not in the fucking mood.

“Sounds like a job for your girlfriend.” That shuts him up. He reaches over and puts his big, banged-up hand on your knee. You want to tell him not to touch you until he takes at least three showers, but the you don’t want to give up the warmth, the gesture of affection. Neither of you say anything for the rest of the ride. He squeezes your thigh before he gets out of the car, the most he can do right in front of his building. 

“Thanks for picking me up.”

“No prob, my dude.” You stare straight ahead. There’s a tightness in your throat like you’re about to cry, and you do _not_ cry in front of people you’re banging. You just want to go home and get back in bed.

“I’ll see you soon?” he says on his way out of the car, tone apologetic.

“Mhm.” 

You call your sister again on the way home. “I feel like I’m dying. Is that normal?”

“You need to stop seeing him,” she says firmly, this time with her mouth full. “It’s not healthy. He’s taking advantage of you.”

“He’s too nice for that.”

“Yeah, he’s great, but right now he’s a fucking swirling vortex of self-hatred that’s sucking in everything and everyone around him. You don’t need that negativity in your life, bro.”

“But riddle me this, Lulu: what if I’m _also_ a swirling vortex of self-hatred?”

“Why would that make it any better? Then it’s like two black holes furiously trying to make out and just wrecking shit in the process.”

“Thanks for that, Carl Sagan.”

“Shut up, Becky.”

The allure of the forbidden has long since faded. When you’d first started hooking up, the secrecy had been sexy and fun. Meeting up in hotels, at clubs, making out in bathrooms and on slightly gross bedspreads with colorful 80s patterns, fast and furtive and heady. Your hand over his mouth to keep him quiet. Doing your best not to leave any marks on his body with your teeth. But like any relationship, the honeymoon ended, and now the things that used to turn you on just make you sad. 

Most of all, you don’t try to wring any promises out of him. You’re terrified of promises. In the movies, the guy never leaves his wife for the mistress, especially if he promises. It’s easier to be in limbo than to lose him. You’ve never been into relationship stuff, but for some reason, you want it with him. You want to hold hands at the mall. You want to post gross kissy pictures on Instagram. You want his arm around you at the movie theater. Maybe you only want it because you can’t have it. Is it worth hurting someone as nice as Julia just because you want a card on Valentine’s Day? 

Then again, maybe you’re just afraid that he doesn’t want the same things you do. Maybe you’re afraid that whether he knows it consciously or not, you’re just an experiment to him. You’re afraid to ask for anything from him, to be too pushy, too needy, too anything. Balancing on this edge is painful.

Your therapist is a lovely, even-keeled woman who takes a lot of notes. Her name is Lucretia. You call her Creesh. She dutifully pretends like this doesn’t get on her nerves. She once tried to refer you to a psychiatrist to push some mood stabilizers on you, but you are not about that life, so she’s on her own with your epic backlog of issues. You only see her because Lup said that either it was therapy or she was going to make you move into her guest bedroom so that she could keep an eye on you, and you do not doubt in the slightest that she would have enforced that ultimatum. It feels nice to know that she worries about you, as perverse as that is.

“I think I’m gonna kill myself,” you say casually, crossing your legs.

“Why do you say that?” Creesh asks, raising her eyebrows over her thick glasses. She is not fazed by what she calls your “attention-seeking behaviors.” She is, of course, obligated to commit you if you’re a threat to yourself or others, but you say you’re going to kill yourself so often that she can probably tell the difference between the real thing and your usual bullshit. You shrug.

“I’ve felt just like completely dead inside all week, and I’m pretty sick of that general vibe.” You sneeze; the essential oil diffuser on the desk that’s supposed to be relaxing just makes your nose itch. Many of the things Creesh seems to think are helpful are, in fact, fucking annoying.

“Bless you. Have you been practicing mindfulness when you feel emotionally numb like we talked about?”

“Yeah,” you lie.

“Has it helped?”

“Not really. Then I just feel dead inside and stupid.”

“What works for you?”

You purse your lips as if you’re thinking about it. You stare at the ceiling fan. You check your hair for split ends. “Fucking,” you finally pronounce.

“So I’m hearing that you feel reliant on sex to make you feel something, good or bad. Do you think that’s safe and healthy?”

You level her with your most withering gaze, but she just smiles. “You want me to say no.”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want to know what you think.”

“It’s not the _most_ dangerous, unhealthy sex I’ve ever had.”

“That doesn’t make it safe and healthy.”

“Guess not.” Honestly, it’s the closest thing you’ve ever had to whatever “safe and healthy” is, but you don’t want to tell her that. Then she would ask about your past relationships, about your childhood, about all the randos who have gotten off on hurting you and the people who seemed to think that the age of consent was more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule, and you don’t want to go there today. Or any day, really.

“Why do you think sex makes you feel better? Is it having someone pay attention to you exclusively for that period of time? Maybe you like having the feelings that come along with intimacy without the daily pressures of a relationship?”

“I don’t know, Creesh, you’re losing me.”

“Okay. That’s fair.” She changes tack, scribbling as quickly as she speaks in her little notebook. “How many regular partners do you have right now?”

“Just one on the reg. A couple other randos a month.”

“And your regular partner is…”

“You know who he is, Creesh.” You look out the window. It’s a fantastic view of the wet spring parking lot. You think about getting up, running out of the office, and flinging yourself headlong into traffic. That sounds a lot better than continuing this conversation.

“The guy with the girlfriend?” she prompts gently. “What was his name again?”

“Magnus.”

“And how do we feel about the girlfriend thing?” You roll your eyes.

“If he doesn’t care, then why should I?” This comes out a tad more hostile than you intended it to.

“Well, if you want to form a stable emotional attachment to someone, a guy who’s in a relationship with someone else isn’t necessarily a good choice.”

“Who said I want to form a stable emotional attachment with anyone?” She catches herself making a face and quickly reverts to neutral. 

The next day, when Magnus presses you up against your kitchen counter and slips his rough hands under the hem of your shirt, you’re acutely aware of how you feel somehow more alive than you did before he knocked on the door. It dawns on you that maybe that’s not entirely his doing. Maybe it’s your brain desperately focusing on anything else, any external stimuli, so that it can stop eating itself alive. 

It doesn’t change the fact that it feels good. There aren’t many good feelings in your life, and you tend to take them as they come, regardless of the consequences. 

He’s growing out his beard, which is, you assume, how men who are trying to appear aggressively straight express themselves. It rasps against your skin when he kisses you. You don’t mind it—it’s actually kind of sexy—but it’s just another one of those things that you have to think about in your appointed role as the Whore of Babylon.

“You better shave, hot stuff,” you murmur, bringing your hand up to his cheek to scratch your fingernails through the short, bristly hairs. “I’m gonna be all red.”

“Good call,” he says against your neck. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“While you’re at it, you wanna change your identity and run away with me?” He pulls back to look at you, trying to gauge whether or not you’re serious. You kind of are, but you do your best to make it seem like you’re not. You raise your eyebrows at him mischievously, running your hands down his broad chest. “Hmm?”

“Okay, but if we’re heading down that road, you’re gonna have to cut your hair.”

“Hell no,” you scoff. “I’ll buy a high-quality wig. Or maybe I’ll finally dye it red.”

“I think you’d look good as a redhead.” He cards his fingers through your hair. You lean into the touch like a fucking cat getting its ears scratched.

“Oh yeah? I think you’d look good with, hmm…a 70s handlebar mustache.” You trace the shape of it on his upper lip with one fingertip. He laughs, wrinkling up his nose. It should be illegal to be that cute.

“Ew. I’d look like Hulk Hogan.” 

“Oh, you didn’t know? Pro wrestlers are my fetish.”

“Then you’ll be thrilled to learn that I was all-state high school wrestling champ three years in a row.” He flexes.

“Whoa.” You fan yourself sarcastically. “Love me a teen in sweaty spandex.” He laughs again and leans in to kiss you, but you press on his chest to lever him backwards. “Wait a minute…you rolled around on a mat with scantily clad dudes for fun in high school and still didn’t realize you were gay?”

“I thought the boners were from the adrenaline.” You throw your head back and cackle.

“Oh my God.” You try not to think about the fact that Julia was probably at those wrestling matches. Maybe she was a cheerleader, jumping up and down by the bleachers, doing cute little cartwheels and back handsprings.

“What were you like in high school?” he asks, tucking your hair behind your ears with both hands, as if he’s trying to get an idea of what you used to look like.

“Imagine a cross between David Bowie in _Labyrinth_ and Tom Cruise in _Interview with a Vampire._ ”

“Oh, wow.”

“I was in a lot of musicals.”

“I bet you were.” He’s smiling again, that big, goofy grin that you love. “I bet you were the star.”

“Nah. I was in the chorus. I can’t sing for shit.” You both laugh, and he bumps his forehead against yours.

“Little did you know, that’s _my_ fetish.”

“Goth theater kids who can’t sing?”

“Yep. Super hot.”

“Disgusting.” You thread your fingers through his belt loops and pull him flush against you again. “So how about running away together? How much you have in them bank accounts? Cash only, no paper trail.” 

“About thirty bucks.”

“Perfect. I have eight. Forty whole dollars to start a new life. We’re all set, baby.” You finally let him kiss you, extra dirty, with tongue and teeth and the whole nine yards. He grabs you around the waist and picks you up like you weigh nothing. You shriek a little in protest, but ultimately, all you can do is hold on tight around his neck while he carries you to the bedroom and tosses you down on the rumpled bed. 

He’s all broad chest and thick arms and long legs, everything hard with muscle and coarse with hair. Manly as all hell. Normally, you don’t really care about that kind of thing, but for some reason, it works for you when it’s him. It seems incredibly unlikely that Julia is very adventurous in bed, so you tend to pull out all the stops. You let him pull your hair and slap your ass, all that pseudo-kinky stuff. He likes it when you call him daddy, which you privately think is very funny and kind of adorable. You let him try whatever he wants to try. This boy is neck deep in toxic masculinity; you know he’s never had space to experiment before. Increasingly, you’re finding that he doesn’t want to be in control anymore. He wants you to be “the man,” i.e. stick various body parts and objects in his ass. You’ve fucked so many people in so many different ways that nothing is really all that titillating to you anymore, but there’s something about watching him experience new sensations that make them feel new again for you, too.

Afterwards, he usually stays to cuddle and trade some pillow-talk for a while before he inevitably leaves. You’re not sure where he goes…back home? To Julia’s apartment? To a bar? You get the feeling sometimes when you’re kissing him goodbye that he doesn’t quite know where he’s going, either. He’ll decide on the way. 

When he’s gone, you call your sister, but she doesn’t pick up. You try to push aside the creeping notion that she’s ignoring you. She’s probably already asleep or enjoying some bland missionary intercourse with her spouse. 

You sit on your kitchen floor and drink wine out of the bottle, something you would never do in front of people. You scroll through Instagram and look at pictures of your exes. You scroll through Lup’s Instagram and look at pictures of her fairy-tale wedding. You scroll all the way back through Julia’s Instagram because Magnus doesn’t have one. 

You scroll through it again, this time in chronological order. Julia in college with an unflattering haircut, rushing a sorority, throwing up those weird Greek gang signs and posing in slutty costumes with a whole gaggle of eerily identical white girls. A picture of she and Magnus together at the big football game, smiling, go whatever-the-fucks. Julia graduating college, posing in her cap and gown with her dad and a bouquet of roses. Wine nights with her sorority friends. Her first day at her first real job. The day she and Magnus adopted their dogs together. Lots more pictures of the dogs. Just, like, so many pictures of the dogs. Her haircut gets steadily more flattering over time. She puts on some weight, but in all the right places. She figures out how to dress for her body type. She’s a kindergarten teacher now: lots of shots of her and a bunch of cute kids. Some pictures of her house plants. Some DIY stuff she must be working on. More dog pics. 

The latest post is a picture of Magnus sitting on her couch, holding what appears to be a gross, ugly lump of wood, fake-pouting. The caption says _tfw bae makes u an art project at work but u can’t tell what it is._ Laugh-crying emoji, laugh-crying emoji, laugh-crying emoji. 

You’re jealous of her, you realize. Not for the obvious reasons, but because it seems like all this tacky, stupid shit actually makes her happy. Sororities and dogs and Starbucks and shoes and being a fucking kindergarten teacher…it’s enough for her like nothing will ever be enough for you. It’s not that she gets the guy and you don’t; it’s that she gets genuine satisfaction out of life, and you never will. How is that fair?

You finish the bottle of wine and start on another. You try to call your sister again, but still no answer. You call Magnus, but he doesn’t pick up, either. You call your therapist’s office, but obviously, nobody is there. 

The more you drink, the angrier and sadder and more hysterical you get. Nobody wants to talk? Fucking fine. You don’t want to talk, either.

You dig through your medicine cabinet, but there’s nothing that seems like it could kill you in there. Benadryl? Maybe, probably not. Tylenol? Seems like a gamble. Allergy pills? Again, no. Some old antibiotics? Obviously not. In the end, you decide that Benadryl will at least probably put you to sleep for most of tomorrow if not the rest of eternity. You toss the pills back and go to bed.

You wake up the next day at 4pm, famished and dehydrated but still very much alive, unfortunately. You expect to feel sad or relieved, but instead, you feel totally and completely empty. Lup calls you back on her way home from work. She isn’t alarmed by the late-night missed calls; you’re a notorious drunk-dialer. She invites you over for dinner, but you decline. You feel like such a burden on her. She’s doing so well. You’re so proud of her. You’re just dragging her down. 

You don’t get out of bed that day.

When you get like this, nothing helps. For the next week, you’re despondent for no goddamn reason, crying all the time, barely making it into work and to therapy. Not eating, not sleeping, not doing much of anything. You send all of Magnus’s calls straight to voicemail, which normally doesn’t seem to throw up any red flags on his radar, but this time, something must be different. He turns up at your apartment unannounced on a Wednesday night. You’re so surprised when you open the door that you don’t say anything; you just stare at him, awkwardly holding a jug of milk that you had been sniff-testing, wearing a pair of faded pajama pants and your sister's college sweatshirt.

“Hey,” he says. He looks like he’s been sleeping even less than usual, dressed in the dirty jeans and the flannel shirt he clearly wore to work earlier. You let him in. You don’t have enough energy to even apologize for the mess, let alone try to tidy it up for company. “Are you okay? I’ve been worried about you.”

“I’m fine.” You put the milk back in the fridge and sit down on your couch, curling your legs up underneath you. A position of suspicion, of self-preservation. He sits down beside you. “Tired.”

“Me, too,” he says.

“I don’t know if you want to be around me tonight,” you say wryly, twisting your hair up into a greasy knot on the top of your head. “I kinda feel like shit.”

“What do you mean?” This assumption seems to have genuinely wounded him.

“I mean, I’m not gonna be very much fun, my guy.”

“That’s okay,” he says softly. “C’mere.” He holds his arm out. You don’t think twice, even though he both looks and smells like he just lost a fight with a bucket of sawdust. You lean into him, cautiously resting your head on his shoulder. Your face fits nicely in the hollow of his neck, right where he smells the most like himself, like sweaty dude and cut wood and very cheap shampoo. Total, full-body exhaustion crashes into you.

You wake up in the middle of the night, cramping up in the weird position that you passed out in. His head is tipped back against the couch, and he’s snoring so loud that you can’t believe that you were ever asleep at all. This is the first time he’s ever slept at your apartment. You feel a vague anxiety, like maybe he isn’t supposed to be here, like maybe something bad is going to happen.

“Magnus.” You jostle him awake.

“Hm?” He sits up blearily, running a hand over his face.

“We fell asleep.”

“Bed,” he mumbles, standing up. He immediately kicks his pants off and leaves them on your living room floor.

“You’re a fucking savage,” you mutter. But you follow him to the bedroom anyway. He strips his shirt off and flops down on your bed in his boxers, taking up most of the surface area. You curl up in on the small sliver of leftover mattress. He throws an arm over you and pulls you toward him; the heavy heat of his body is comforting. In this position, his snoring isn’t as loud, and his breath ruffles the hair on the back of your neck strangely delicately.

You try to live in the moment like Creesh is always telling you to do, without worrying about the future or obsessing over the past. Because, get real: this hasn’t been a walk in the park and it definitely isn’t going to end well. But right now, you feel a little better than you’ve been feeling. Maybe that’s because your entire brain is built to suck the approval and warmth and satisfaction out of other people like a parasite, but then again, maybe it’s because you’ve found someone that you like, someone who likes you, who doesn’t care if you’re sad and boring sometimes. You don’t get a lot of good feelings or nice moments or memories that you want to keep, so you try your best to stay in this one. It might be the best you’re gonna get.


End file.
